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GERTRUDE BELL : THE QUEEN OF DESERT

I am really greatful to the film that came out this month about the life and importance of the britain woman Gertrude Margareth Lowthian Bell during the last breaths of the ottoman Empire.

I love when films depict characters and history in this manner, making people unable to stop searching for more informations after the end of the film. Of course films are bound to be slightly romanticize to be of some liking to the viewers but even so I liked this film and the photography is just amazing…

We have plenty clever women throughout history but to be so essential in so many aspects of different subjects: archeology, history, politics and literature is just a great example of what a woman birth in the nineteenth century could give to the world. Being a spy or not is not as great as the importance of her travelling journals in my opinion. Being in places where a woman alone could not be, or more, where a european woman never visited before, always between deserts and oasis, with people of another culture, just to study them and report things as a scientist would.

In my opinion she’s on the same level of anthropologists and ethnologists of her time in Great Britain that came to realize that a study of the tribes are meant to be done on place and not sitting in a chair looking at others journals and essays… She wanted to meet beduins and Drusi to study them and comprehend their points of view.

She graduated from Oxford, full marks, with a degree in History, just like me, and has always been a passionate linguist who could speak fluently so many languages.

I really look upon her as a role model, like a far away star to always try to reach.

I think being a woman in that particular period of time would be hard to picture in our minds as women right now has a lot of prerogatives and we are slowly coming close to gender equality. But just imagine the hardships she was put through… she tried her best to just break off the laces that kept her tied down to all the mundane rules expected from a woman of her standing in Great Britain and even in northern Africa.

I really would recommend for you to see the film in which Nicole Kidman has the main role of Gertrude. Apart from your personal opinion on the actors just look through the screen and let your mind wonder in amazement.

I would like to be like her one day… A traveller just for herself, wandering through places where people don’t know you and you can experience for the first time new things. Keeping a journal and in the old days just reading those pages with a feeling of melancholy, knowing you are above all with your knowledge. I really would like to.